The important thing to remember is to make the areas that will be transparent black BUT not only on your trans map but also on your texture! You missed a step. 'Apply texture to highlight' has to be checked, too. And there's a drawback, in that this doesn't work so well with black PVC with patterns, and such, because a nearly black texture with 'apply texture to highlights' will make the highlights go away for a lot of it. The trick to that is to make the texture in medium greys or even light greys, with black in the transparency areas, then use a very dark charcoal as the object colour, light or white highlights, and apply texture to highlights ticked. This way the object colour makes it dark, not the texture, and the object colour doesn't apply to the highlights, only the texture. - - - - - -

Now for a trick -- in Photoshop, (I don't know other paint programs, really) you can easily add the transparency to the texture. Simply open both (make them the same size ifthe arent' already), select all from the transparency, copy, and paste onto the texture. Set the layer to Multiply mode, flatten, and re-save. Viola. Works for hair, too. - - - - - -

ON a similar line, it's possible to get glowing bits in P4 (P5 it's easy because you can have an ambience map). It's not perfect with the shadows, but it's better than nothing B^) Try this: 1) Make a texture as normal. 2) Darken the texture using levels adjustment or whatever until the whole thing looks black but the histogram shows it's not quite. 3) Draw on some white spots. 4) Save it as a TIFF ir BMP. Don't save it as a GIF or it will proabbly just go black&white. Don't save it as a JPEG because the JPEG algorithm will look horrible in the tiny thin histogram of your image's main range. 5) Load it up as a texture. Set the ambient colour to something bright. 6) Render. Most of your picture should come out in vaguely normal tones (the gradiation of range won't be as even). The glowing bits will glow brightly.